Open government often carries a significant risk to activists: organizing efforts may be “locked up” by Federal agencies, even with the best intentions.

The rewards, and risks, of squirreling away

Consider Terra Ziporyn Snider. Last fall, she initiated a petition on the White House website requesting changes in school start times. Then current White House rules required that she gather 5000 signatures within 30 days in order to keep the petition on the site. She and her supporters encountered various technical problems – intermittent site outages, difficulty in signing up new users — and as the deadline approached, with 1575 signatures recorded, Dr. Snider realized that the fruit of her efforts was about to be digitally vanished, per White House rules.

I was taken by the lengths she went to transplant the list of names she had built at the White House to Move-On. Though these signatures had been gathered through her online organizing efforts, and of course were stored on a hard drive somewhere in the whitehouse.gov domain, she had no way to access these data easily. Instead, she printed out the petition and, apparently, retyped the signatures by hand.

Imagine a New England squirrel storing away nuts for next winter in the trunk of a tourist’s car – it’s secure today, tomorrow, and perhaps even next week, but when the snow comes, the car — and the nuts — are in Florida, and the squirrel starves.

Of course, in the case of White House petitions, the potential of reaching a wider audience for your cause and of getting the attention of the Obama administration may make this risk worthwhile.

But, as Dr. Snider found, sometimes the car drives away, and you’ve got to scramble not to be left empty-handed. How could one reduce the risk, particularly for activists who don’t know or don’t have access to sites live Move-On?

A tool for liberating signatures

Her story was my inspiration to build a page scraping toolset that would allow activists to get the benefits of White House web petitions, while reducing the risk.

The toolset for liberating signatures from White House petitions is almost complete. It’s a browser-based javascript plugin that automates signature capture with some shortcuts to reduce loads on the petition server.

As a proof of concept, I set the plugin to work on two recent petitions. The first requests that the Administration rescind regulations mandating that religious institutions provide contraceptive coverage under their employee health insurance plans, even if this is contrary to their religious precepts. The second urges the Administration to “stand strong” in maintaining this mandate.

The mechanics of initiating and signing petitions

Anyone may initiate a petition. Per the rules currently in force, new petitions are visible only to those web visitors who already know the specific petition URL. Once a petition receives its 150th signature, it is listed by the White House in the index of current petitions and can be found by appropriate search terms.

The initiator and all other petition supporters then have 30 days to gather at least 25000 signatures in total. If they fail to reach that threshold within 30 days, the petition disappears, as Dr Snider experienced. If 25000 people “sign” the petition, the White House promises to post a response.

A WhiteHouse.gov login is required to sign a petition. To get a login, you provide your email address, your name, and, optionally, city, state and zipcode. Each petition signature block includes the first name and last initial, the signature’s order in the overall total, the date the signature was provided, and the city and state of the signer, if provided. For instance:

Chris B
Washington, DC
February 22, 2012
Signature # 1,079

Example: Signature data from the “Rescind” petition

From January 28 through February 10, the Rescind petition gathered 29,127 signatures. The inset below displays the raw data gathered by the page scraping toolset, which can also be downloaded by the link at the bottom of the table.

This animated map shows how the signatures flowed in from January 28 to February 10, normalized by the population of each state.

Fullscreen
The shading of each state shows the number of signatures provided by that state, to date, for each million residents, based on 2010 Census results. States that “boxed above their weight” are shown in darker green; states that were underrepresented, in very light green. Since the figures are cumulative, each state grows somewhat darker over time. Click on the slider at the bottom of the map to show how the signatures accumulated over time.

that the petition took off pretty quickly – two signatures on day one, 32 on day two, 1,386 on day three (reaching all fifty states and DC)

that state participation varied dramatically: Nebraska provided more than 480 signatures per million residents, North Dakota more than 360, while Mississippi provided just 31 signatures per million inhabitants. (Overall, across the US, 127 signatures were provided per million residents, if we assume that all signatures came from the United States.)

4,951 signatures were provided by people who did not state their location — which shows up as NULL in the data.

Next post: How does the signature flow for the “stand strong” petition compare? What surprises do we find when we compare states’ activity on these two opposing petitions? Are these signers as reluctant to provide place information as the Rescind signers?

A postscript for data geeks

Some curiosities:

Each signature is numbered. The same sequence number may appear multiple times on the signatures page, indicating, presumably, two or more different people who signed almost simultaneously. For instance, if the third, fourth, and fifth signers all acted simultaneously, the first six signatures would be numbered 1, 2,3,3,3,6.

One Rescind signer was particularly eager: he signed twice in quick succession, so his name and place show up twice in a row with the same sequence number. This anomaly can’t be tracked by the software currently, leading to a database count of 29,126 signatures, one less than shown on the White House site.

In addition to the “no location” signatures, 28 people provided place information for military post offices or mistyped their place information.

The scraping tool captures the first name and initial of the signer as shown on the petition, but I’ve omitted this column from the download for the moment.

Chris, I am honored and moved that my plight inspired this effort and look forward to seeing and perhaps using the new Citizen “tool.” Unfortunately, though, I was not able to access the email addresses from WhiteHouse.gov, although I fortunately printed out the 1575 names before they were obliterated and will carry them with me when I deliver my new SignOn.org petition (http://bit.ly/tWa4dS) to DC beginning March 7. We’re hoping to get this new petition to the original goal of 5000 by then. SignOn.org, which is hsponsored but usually not publicized by MoveOn, doesn’t have the official status of the White House petitions, but at least these social media efforts seems to have sparked a national grassroots movement. Because we consider this to be a critical and complex matter of public health, safety, and equity, we’re still determined to bring it to national attention one way or another.

[…] Last week, I used a trial run of a new “petition scraping” plugin I’ve developed to see which states most strongly supported the recent White House petition that requested the Administration to rescind the health care reform contraception mandate for Catholic employers. […]

LinkedIn

Subscribe:

Search this website for:

Categories

Responding to 9/11

... we need to be warriors: take our losses, bury our dead, isolate our exposures, repair specific flaws in our systems and stick to our mission plan:
... In America's third century,[ it] has not changed for 228 years: Our God-given purpose is to demonstrate that a varied populace from disparate origins can live peacefully under an open government that governs minimally but humanely.